Pericles, I am pleased that the Federal government has decided to upgrade or renew its computer systems as this will increase activity for ICT professionals. There is always a shortage of the truly talented ICT professionals but there is also room for the competent practitioner and perhaps you need to fit the right person into the right hole.

I am not sure if you are one of the many IT employers who try to hire graduates with 18 months experience. If so, your talent pool will be increasing as the government projects get under way.

When I read articles in the IT press I always ask who is the spokesman, and what are they trying to sell? There has been a disconnect between the hype and the reality for a number of years,

Now that discussion of offshoring has entered the public consciousness it is possible to question the sensibility of storing Australian Tax information in India, I bet the Service Level Agreement that the Australian Tax Office has with EDS says nothing about where the information must be stored, because the programming is all done in India.

Likewise we should question whether its in the Australian Defense Forces interests to have Optus [Singtel] operating their communication network. Well with Sol Trujillo in charge of Telstra it probably is the best decision.

I do not want to see Westpac store my banking information in India and I wonder what security breaches this will expose me to. I wonder what happens to those displaced banking staff.

billie, I'm not sure of the point you are making.

>>I am not sure if you are one of the many IT employers who try to hire graduates with 18 months experience. If so, your talent pool will be increasing as the government projects get under way.<<

I have employed students on work experience, I have been the first employer of new graduates, and I have employed seasoned practitioners.

I have had great value out of the first and third categories. Work experience folk tend to be (if you select well) absolutely brilliant, with a wealth of new ideas as well as a work ethic to die for. Seasoned (late twenties/early thirties) talent is expensive, but generally they choose you as an employer for solid reasons - they like the technology we work with, they like the freedom to innovate, or simply like working for a small company rather than a corporate bureaucracy etc.

The straight-from-uni people are more risky. They learn very quickly, which is good, but at the same time are super-aware of their increasing market value. As such, it is difficult to make a dollar out of them, as their "external" value (i.e. their actual contribution to a development project) rarely lives up to their own ticket upon themselves. So it tends to be other employers who reap the rewards of the training and development these individuals have received.

But none of this has anything to do with the fact that a) there is presently an acute IT skills shortage in Australia and b) by and large, outsourced development projects do not deliver the goods, and are gradually heading back onshore.

What I cannot do is reconcile these facts with your position that "[s]ince 2000 only 20% of IT graduates from the top universities could get jobs in IT".

Where are they all? I can't track them down for love nor money.

As for your concerns about where data is stored, as long as the local Australian custodian of the data knows how to provide all the necessary programmatic safeguards, its physical location is largely irrelevant.